Marshall Tells the Story of Thurgood Before He Was a Household Name

Before Hollywood up-and-comer Chadwick Boseman stars as T'Challa in Marvel's Black Panther film in 2018, he'll play a real-life superhero in an origin story of another sort.

Marshall, which also stars Josh Gad, Sterling K. Brown, and Kate Hudson, follows legendary lawyer and civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall before his groundbreaking Supreme Court appointment, before Brown vs. the Board of Education—and before he was a household name.

The case at hand was a 1940 rape trial in Connecticut, when a high-society white woman, Eleanor Strubing (played by Hudson), accused her black chauffeur and butler Joseph Spell (played by Brown) of the crime.

The lurid details of the reported incident inspired a flood of publicity; the case appeared on the front page of the New York Times, and one paper even called it "the sex trial of the century." The stories are what prompted the NAACP to get involved, sending a confident, even cocky 32-year-old Thurgood Marshall to defend Spell.

The film centers around not only the trial, but also the unlikely friendship between Marshall and Sam Friedman, a Jewish lawyer from the area (played in the film by Josh Gad) who had been hired to assist on the case by the Bridgeport NAACP.

Watch Marshall defend Spell against the criminal accusations, but also the prejudices of the judge and the jury, in the trailer below.

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